Who’ll Buy the Cow?

I’m watching a movie called Happy Go Lucky on my TV, which stars Sally Hawkins, the same woman I saw in Mrs. Warren’s Profession in November in New York City.

It’s about a single 30 year old woman, a kindergarten teacher, who is happy with her life, which irks everyone around her, a kind of anti-Bridget Jones.

(And supposedly Elliott Cowan, who played Mr. Darcy in Lost in Austen, plays a bar tender in this movie, although I haven’t reached that part.)

Hmm.

Spinsterhood, as they once called it, is a major theme in Flo in the City. In 1910 Edith is 27, so she’s thirty at the end, and with no prospects, because she has lost her ‘great love’ in a hotel fire. (I researched this and he was a bank clerk for the Bank of Montreal who was transferred to Cornwall in 1910 and then perished in an infamous fire.)

Marion only jokes about being an old maid, like many of the other teachers around her. But in those days the minute you married you left the profession, so of course, teachers were divided into two groups, the very young and long past ripe.

Teacher turn-over was a major problem in those days. All the school inspectors complained about it.

Yesterday, in Salon.com there was an article about the modern woman, how she’s more educated than her male peers and how she is sacrificing sex for her career. This supposedly has something to do with the fact that men like chasing women and only desire a woman if they have to chase her, and these days women chase men and that is a turn off, so they do not commit to these women.

I have to admit, it all sounded sooo familiar, even if this commentator claimed to be using ‘scientific principles’ to prove his point.

They said the same things back in 1910. Take that Gertrude Atherton article I have posted on http://www.tighsolas.ca/ which I call Does Love Matter to a Suffragette.

My mother told me this old adage: The man chases the woman until she catches him. My father told me another one: “Who’ll buy the cow if you give the milk for free.”

In fact, it seems to me that a theory like this comes out once every 10 years or so. It’s sells books for the author and serves to undermine women’s achievements, somehow. And it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, although this article admitted that statistics show that the more educated the woman the more chance she has for a successful marriage.

Of course, with women better educated than men, on average, the idea that women must marry ‘up’ might have to be let go of, for once and for all.

You know, Flo Nicholson married later in life, to a railroad man, and apparently her family was somewhat scandalized, because he was a little rough around the edges.

But from all accounts he was a very nice man. (My husband says so.)

A lot of woman remained spinsters in those days because their families would not let them marry down, to marry someone with less social position or education.

On the other hand, Marion Nicholson almost didn’t get married to Hugh Blair in 1913, because his family thought HE was marrying down. The Nicholsons were penniless, remember.

Mr. and Mrs. Blair didn’t even show up for the wedding in October. (I have a nice, warm letter from Hugh’s father, a prominent Three Rivers Lumber Man, to Hugh from June 1913, that never mentions his upcoming wedding or Marion’s name.

Yes, we’d all like a handsome, rich, smart and Alpha Male mate, like Mr. Darcy, but one that is totally devoted to us, who follows us around like a sick puppy, but that’s fantasy, like a Victoria Secret Model for a man, someone with no apparent achievements except being born beautiful.

Anyway, I haven’t noticed this syndrome among my son. My sons sure go for the smart, ambitious women. Yes, the girls are pretty too, but who isn’t pretty at 24?

With respect to marrying up, I recall an article by Barbara Amiel in Chatelaine a couple of decades ago that irked me at the time. She claimed it was to a woman’s biological advantage to Marry UP. I wrote a letter to the editor which was printed, saying that you can define ‘marrying up’ in many way. Marrying a man who is a good father is marrying up as far as I was concerned.

Anyway, that’s pretty ironic, all things considered. Amiel. who never had children, I believe, found an alpha male who was devoted to her like a sick puppy, but look what happened?

"LADY" = Not a Prostitute

Emmeline Pankhurst: Trafalgar Square Riot. Unladylike behavior.

The 1896 book, Light in Dark Places, also had a section on etiquette.

Here’s the part about Street Etiquette. Now, I’ve read about such rules before and seen them in movies..but now I understand how much “the social evil” informs the rules of etiquette. Most of these rules had no real practical purpose EXCEPT to keep a woman from looking like a prostitute. (Either Goddess or Whore. No In-between.)The book Angels in the Workplace explains how these rules of etiquette for women handcuffed them in the workplace. Good girls don’t complain….

1) Your conduct on the street should always be modest and dignified. Ladies should carefully avoid all loud and boistrous conversation or laughter and all undue liveliness in public.

2)When walking on the street, do not allow yourself to be absent minded, or fail to recognize a friend; do not go along reading a book or newspaper.

3)In walking with a lady on the street give her the inner part, unless the outside is the safer part.

4)Your arm should not be given during the day except to your wife or a near relative or someone old or in need of help.

5)At night, the arm should always be given, especially when ascending the stairs of a public building.

6)In crossing the street, a lady should gracefully raise her dress a little above the ankle with one hand. (Hense that GLIMPSE OF ANKLE lyric.)To raise with two hands is vulgar except in places where the mud is very deep. (By 1910 the city streets of major cities were so congested, so chaotic, few women crossed them. And I see no 1910 era videos on Youtube where a woman lifts her dress to cross the street. Indeed, I believe the length of skirts in general were raised in the era to accomodate this new urban reality.)

7) A gentleman meeting a lady acquaintance on the street must not presume to join her in her walk, unless first asking permission.

8)If you have anything to say to a lady walking on the street, how intimate you may be, don’t stop her, but turn around and walk in company with her. (I assume women on the street, during the day had to keep walking or look like ‘street walkers)

9) A lady must not venture out on the street alone at night. By doing so she compromises her dignity and exposes herself to indignity at the hands of the rougher classes.

10)A lady does not form acquaintances on the street, or seek to form acquaintances with members of the other sex or her own sex. Her demeanor is always is always modest and unassuming. Nor does she demand favours from gentlemen.

Now, frankly, from what I read in Marion’s 1907 diary, when she was teaching in Sherbrooke, her interactions with men were many and quite informal. Sherbrooke was a large town, larger than Richmond, but not the BIG city.

By many definitions, Marion was not ‘a lady’. But I don’t think she cared too much. She liked to sign her letters M.A.N. esquire. (Marion Annie Nicholson).

Girl on Porch, Boy in Tree

Yesterday, since I had these guests coming for Thanksgiving, I had to clean up a bit, ( a bit more than usual, anyway, which isn’t saying much) and as I did so, I played the ‘radio’ on the television for background. Galaxy, the stations are called. My two favourite channels are Swinging Standards and Jukebox Oldies.

40,50′s 60′s, love songs all the time. But, most songs that have ever been written are love songs, aren’t they? (Unless they are spiritual songs.) Singing is a mating call, after all.

So listening to these iconic songs (played on a loop on these stations) is not only a trip down memory lane for me (although I’m sixties girl and my memories start in that decade) but they are also a trip back to a time when my hormones were raging.

One favourite song is Boys in the Trees.

With this tune Carly Simon paints a vivid picture of adolescence and the active nature of boys’ adolescence and the passive nature of girls’ adolescence, who are ‘sentenced first to burn and then to freeze’ as the boys play in the trees. (This was clearly before video games.)

I have to wonder if Flora Nicholson, 16 in 1908, when my story Flo in the City (based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ ) begins, ever had a boys in the trees moment. I’m sure she did, but with variations. As I have written in this blog, young people in Edwardian times were repressed, and sexuality and sin were so intermingled in girls’ minds, it’s hard to imagine what detours their sexual energy had to take to be expressed. And, yet, love and courtship was still the main theme of the novel, as novelist Gertrude Atherton wrote in an essay in the Delineator in 1913.

And adolescents didn’t have songs back then to listen to over and over on their transistor radio or to play on their bedroom phonograph as they pined over some basketball star at their high school who was going out with the local beauty, a Ford fashion model…. Talking machines were just being introduced and these were expensive. There were popular songs, of course, and most of them love songs but many felt these songs to be louche (is that the word?) which is why Edison had to try to convince mothers to let the talking machines into the home, that they were ‘good wholesome fun’… In his adverts, mothers looked like muses, in flowing robes, their hair unravelled down around their shoulders, their children, like disciples, gathered around them.

A lot of these silly love songs from the 1910 era were associated with the Vaudeville circuit. Remember, the good ladies of the Montreal Council of Women’s Immoral Materials Committee felt that Vaudeville was very low-brow or as they put it ‘of a very ordinary tone.’

You can listen to some of the popular 1910 songs here: I doubt they’ll bring back memories, but they were fun

http://www.besmark.com/popular1.html

Anyway, I have a scene were Marion gets all hot and bothered watching a strong man wrestle snakes at Dominion Park (who wouldn’t?) Maybe I will have a boys in the trees moment for Flora, as she sits on the porch, maybe featuring actually boys in trees…in homage to the very beautiful and very talented Carly Simon.

Dating 1912 style. Vaudeville Outing.

Marion Nicholson, in 1912, on the lawn of Tighsolas, in Richmond.

I just read the plot of a play, being performed at Montreal’s Orpheum in 1912 as part of a larger bill. In the play, a young man is disinherited by his wealthy parents, so he and his best friend hatch a plan to have him be a millionaire in a year. (And millionaire meant something back then.) He is to “dress well but simply, go to a small town somewhere, get some form of employment, join the church, refrain from drinking and smoking, and soon, he’ll be able to have any woman in the town he wants.

The message here is, if you want to marry, impress the parents, not the girl.

I am interested, as in 1912, according to the Nicholson letters on http://www.tighsolas.ca/, Marion and her beau, Hugh Blair, had a favorite entertainment venue, the Orpheum, located not far from the Nickel on Ste. Catherine near Bleury.

Maybe they saw this very show. On the same bill, a magician/spiritualist who conjured the spirits of painters past, a male/female comedy duet with dubious singing ability, some acrobats with a performing dog, some other acrobats who were ‘muscular’. In short, typical Vaudeville.

Lately, as I have blogged, I have been watching The Road Movies and The Marx Brothers on Turner Classics. These were acts polished to perfection on the Vaudeville circuit in the next decade. The Orpheum was part of a North American Chain.

Oh, and that day in 1912, there were also two short skits on the bill, one called “Just Married” that, according to the Gazette article I read, was cliche.

It must have been awkward to go out on ‘a date’ in those days. “Marriage” was such an elephant in the room and so many skits evolved around the Love thing. (As they still do today, an as they always will although today, I imagine, it’s the sex and explicit sex talk in popular teen movies that might prove embarrassing. Although I might just be projecting, as young people might be inured to such stuff.

(I say this because last year my husband and I went to see Tropic Thunder, a movie I love and during a certain very funny but well, crude, scene with Jack Black tied to a tree, withdrawing from cocaine, my husband turned to me and through his tears said “There’s a young boy sitting beside me.” which on some level was weirder than the movie. We’re pretty loose here in Quebec, but still.)

The fact was, Hugh Blair, my husband’s grand father, was about to be disinherited by his wealthy family, because he insisted on marrying Marion Nicholson, a country bumkin with no dowry, instead of someone else. I have a 1912 letter where he blows off this other woman, saying he thought they were “just good friends.”

Marion mesmerized him because she was so independent, I think. The other woman was a Mamma’s girl, or as they say in Jane Austen “still under the protection of her mother.”

Hugh proposes to Marion in May 1913. I know because I have Marion’s letter home where she draws the ring, a piece with three nice diamonds. (I have even seen said ring, which was passed to my mother in law.) She accepts despite the fact that she also wrote in an era letter “sometimes I like him and sometimes I hate him”…(Well, maybe that’s proof positive she’s in love.)

In courtship Hugh is dashing, funny, helpful “I don’t know what I would do without him,”writes the very capable Marion. In marriage, he turns out a bit of a baby.

I guess I can include this scene in Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in 1912 based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/. Maybe I’ll have Marion and Hugh take Flo. I know they took her to Dominion Park.

Here’s an aside. When my first son was born, I wanted to name him Hugh, after Hugh in How Green was my Valley. Anyway, my husband, who has dyslexia and can’t spell, said NO. I admitted it wasn’t an easy name to spell. Well, only much much later did I realize his grandfather was named Hugh. If I had known back then, I would have pressed the case.

LOVE, HATS,and IRONING

Mary Pickford in the New York Hat. D W Griffith. 1912

Well, the next chapter of my novel Flo in the City, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ will begin with the famous hat incident. Not only that, Edith will have another meeting with her beau Charlie G. And Margaret will tell a couple of interesting stories: one about a man having an affair and one about a story the Minister told in a sermon, which she liked very much.

Here’s the letter with info about the hat incident.

Dear Marion, wrote Margaret to her second daughter in Montreal. I hope you got over your cold.

Her eldest daughter, Edith, had just left after a short visit. She had had a message from her on again off again beau Charlie G. saying he would like to see her again. The next week, in Montreal,
So Edith came home to Tighsolas to wash her silk dress and have her mother work up a spring coat.

She left on the morning train, excited and worn out.

After seeing E off, Margaret wrote I went to Miss Hudon’s to cancel the order I had for a hat. She had already trimmed it, she did not wait for some trimming I was bringing. I think the hat too large. It would look well on you. Still, Mrs. Montgomery thinks it is becoming to me so I shall have to wear it. I met Edith McCourt at the church door with an immense black one on so I told her to come and sit with me. Mine would not look so large. So she did. So I guess it was all right. I don’t know whether Healy could see the Minister or not.

We had a grand sermon, so I forgot about the size of my hat. I heard an old story that suited me about an old Scotch man who had two sons Jamie and Willie. Jamie went away from home to earn his living. The old man was praying that Jamie might be kept from all danger, sickness and evil temptations. But he said, “Don’t bother your head about Willie. I’ll keep him straight.” I was telling them, that was like me, always worrying about the absent ones. Edith went away being tired. Just as you did, she ironed for two days. Have you heard from Herb?

There’s an awful lot to this letter: hats, sermons and children and love and ironing.